Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 15

Metochites wrote twenty poems, of which only two are published. The first one, of 1355 lines, is a long description of his own life and of the monastery of Chora; the second poem is another description of that monastery; the other eighteen poems, which are not yet published, have been analyzed, and they contain a great deal of information on the authors life and on the historical events of his time. In the nineteenth poem Metochites gave a detailed description of his palace with its riches, comfort, and beauty, which he lost during the revolution of 1328. His poems are written in a polished style which is sometimes not easy to understand. But this was not his peculiarity alone; many Byzantine writers, both of prose and poetry, wrote in a style which lacked clarity and needed commentaries. From their point of view the subtlest style had most value.

Metochites also left some letters; only four of them exist, and they are of no great importance. In all likelihood his other letters were destroyed by his enemies. Metochites role in art is also very important; this importance is due particularly to the mosaics of the Chora. He was right when he expressed the hope that his work in the field of art would secure to him a glorious memory among posterity until the end of the world.

Without doubt, one of the most important problems for research in the history of the Palaeologian renaissance is the whole work of Theodore Metochites. There is still much to be done. His greatness as a man and his importance in the cultural movement of the fourteenth century is just beginning to be recognized. His writings must first be completely published and studied, and only then will it be possible to estimate adequately a great man in a great cultural epoch.

Among the philologists under Andronicus II may be mentioned Thomas Magister, who came from the literary circle of Moschopulus, Theodore Metochites, and Gregoras, and was the author of many scholia on ancient writers, orations, and letters, and whose literary work deserves to be better known than it is now. Another philologist of the same time was Demetrius Triklinius, an excellent text critic, who, as Krumbacher said, may be placed on a level with some modern editors, and a high authority on ancient authors, such as Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Theocritus.

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